Stephanie Rosenbloom, of the New York Times writes, “One in every 4 1/2 minutes spent on the Web is spent on a social-networking site or blog. And last year the average visitor spent 66 percent more time on such sites than in 2009, when early adopters were already feeling digitally fatigued.

But any attempt by weary networkers to scale back is complicated by the proliferation of websites such as Klout and PeerIndex that are busily computing users’ influence scores to rank them in an online hierarchy. (On Klout, each user is assigned a score from 1 to 100. If you’re in the high teens, you’re average; if you’re in the 40s you have a healthy following; if you score 100—you’re Justin Bieber.)

Depending on the person you ask, this is either awesome or terrifying. In the future, brands and even potential employers could conceivably make decisions about you based on your score.”